SALMON LEATHER: the new eco-friendly leather

SALMON LEATHER \ˈsa-mən ˈle-thər\

n. 1 a: A dyeable textile made from salmon skin—a byproduct of the fish processing industry that usually gets tossed into the landfill—using chemicals that are less toxic than those for tanning mammal hides because fish scales are easier to remove from skin than hair. (Note: no new salmon is killed expressly for its skin.) b: A resilient fabric that is stronger than most land leathers—and does not smell like fish. c: A reliable, affordable source of “sea leather” used by companies such asES Salmon Leather, One October, Unnurwear, and Skini London in clothing, accessories, furnishing, home decor, and even bikinis.

Salmon leather was recently used in the form of die-cut paillettes by fashion designer Isaac Mizrahito create an entire ensemble (jacket, dress, open-back shoes) for the Nature Conservancy’s“Design for a Living World” exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City.

Wool Felt Balls: New Carpet

DOTS
Inspired by the project Modul_le, Dots have been developed for the Belgian carpet manufacturer LIMITED EDITION. Dots is made out of 100 % soft felted wool balls. The balls are put togegether to make tiles, wich can be assembled or used separatly.


Materials: 100% felted wool
Dimensions tiles: 56 x 56 cm
Production: www.limitededition.be

© 2006 Limited Edition

Diane Steverlynck was born in 1976 in Belgium. After completing training in visual arts, she studied textile design at La Cambre National School of Visual Art in Brussels. In 2003 Diane Steverlynck launched her own studio in Brussels. Since then she develops objects and textile accessories for companies and for private interior projects. She also works on self-initiated projects and productions, witch you can find in shops and galleries. At the same time she is active in the teaching area.

Diane Steverlynck follows a personal approach centred on objects and textiles. Her work focus is research on textiles, materials and structures and their influence on the use and identity of everyday objects. Characterized by their diversity, her products are simple and coherent. Behind each of her pieces, there is a story, one that involves material, people, usage and memory.

Optical Fibers: Zinc Selenide Intelligent Efficiency

New kind of optical fiber developed

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Zinc Selenide Optical Fibers: The lab of John Badding at Penn State has made, for the first time, a new type of optical fiber that contains at its core a high-purity crystalline compound of zinc selenide -- a highly efficient semiconductor with superior optical and electronic properties.

A team of scientists led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State, has developed the very first optical fiber made with a core of zinc selenide -- a light-yellow compound that can be used as a semiconductor. The new class of optical fiber, which allows for a more effective and liberal manipulation of light, promises to open the door to more versatile laser-radar technology.
Such technology could be applied to the development of improved surgical and medical lasers, better countermeasure lasers used by the military, and superior environment-sensing lasers such as those used to measure pollutants and to detect the dissemination of bioterrorist chemical agents. The team's research will be published in the journal Advanced Materials.
"It has become almost a cliché to say that optical fibers are the cornerstone of the modern information age," said Badding. "These long, thin fibers, which are three times as thick as a human hair, can transmit more than a terabyte -- the equivalent of 250 DVDs -- of information per second. Still, there always are ways to improve on existing technology." Badding explained that optical-fiber technology always has been limited by the use of a glass core. "Glass has a haphazard arrangement of atoms," Badding said. "In contrast, a crystalline substance like zinc selenide is highly ordered. That order allows light to be transported over longer wavelengths, specifically those in the mid-infrared."
Unlike silica glass, which traditionally is used in optical fibers, zinc selenide is a compound semiconductor. "We've known for a long time that zinc selenide is a useful compound, capable of manipulating light in ways that silica can't," Badding said. "The trick was to get this compound into a fiber structure, something that had never been done before." Using an innovative high-pressure chemical-deposition technique developed by Justin Sparks, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry, Badding and his team deposited zinc selenide waveguiding cores inside of silica glass capillaries to form the new class of optical fibers. "The high-pressure deposition is unique in allowing formation of such long, thin, zinc selenide fiber cores in a very confined space," Badding said.
The scientists found that the optical fibers made of zinc selenide could be useful in two ways. First, they observed that the new fibers were more efficient at converting light from one color to another. "When traditional optical fibers are used for signs, displays, and art, it's not always possible to get the colors you want," Badding explained. "Zinc selenide, using a process called nonlinear frequency conversion, is more capable of changing colors."
Second, as Badding and his team expected, they found that the new class of fiber provided more versatility not just in the visible spectrum, but also in the infrared -- electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. Existing optical-fiber technology is inefficient at transmitting infrared light. However, the zinc selenide optical fibers that Badding's team developed are able to transmit the longer wavelengths of infrared light. "Exploiting these wavelengths is exciting because it represents a step toward making fibers that can serve as infrared lasers," Badding explained. "For example, the military currently uses laser-radar technology that can handle the near-infrared, or 2 to 2.5-micron range. A device capable of handling the mid-infrared, or over 5-micron range would be more accurate. The fibers we created can transmit wavelengths of up to 15 microns."
Badding also explained that the detection of pollutants and environmental toxins could be yet another application of better laser-radar technology capable of interacting with light of longer wavelengths.
"Different molecules absorb light of different wavelengths; for example, water absorbs, or stops, light at the wavelengths of 2.6 microns," Badding said. "But the molecules of certain pollutants or other toxic substances may absorb light of much longer wavelengths. If we can transport light over longer wavelengths through the atmosphere, we can see what substances are out there much more clearly."
In addition, Badding mentioned that zinc selenide optical fibers also may open new avenues of research that could improve laser-assisted surgical techniques, such as corrective eye surgery.

In addition to Badding and Sparks, other researchers who contributed to this study include Rongrui He of Penn State's Department of Chemistry and the Materials Research Institute; Mahesh Krishnamurthi and Venkatraman Gopalan of Penn State's Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Materials Research Institute; and Pier J.A. Sazio, Anna C. Peacock, and Noel Healy of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton. Support for this research was provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Penn State Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

Thermoplastics from Chicken Feathers!

 

Nearly 3 billion pounds of chicken feathers are plucked each year in the United States -- and most end up in the trash. Now, a new method of processing those feathers could create better types of environmentally-friendly plastics.

"Chicken feathers are one of those materials that is still basically waste," said Yiqi Yang, a researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and one of the authors of the new research. Feathers are mostly made of keratin, the protein that's responsible for the strength of wool, hair, fingernails, and hooves, he added. So they "should be useful as a material."
Past efforts to create plastic from feathers resulted in products that didn’t hold up mechanically or weren't completely water-resistant, said Yang’s University of Nebraska colleague Narenda Reddy, who also worked on the project.
To make the new plastic, the researchers started with chicken and turkey feathers that had been cleaned and pulverized into a fine dust. They then added chemicals that made the keratin molecules join together to form long chains -- a process called polymerization. The team presented their work March 24 at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California.
The plastic they made was stronger than similar materials made from starch or soy proteins, and it stood up to water. Moreover, high temperature treatment of the feathers at the start of the process would blast out any possible contamination, such as from bird flu, according to Reddy.
The new material is a thermoplastic. "We can use heat and melt it to make different products," said Reddy. Heating it to a modest -- for industrial manufacturing -- 170 degrees Celsius allows the plastic to be molded into some desired shape, and it can be melted and remolded many times. Unlike most thermoplastics, which are petroleum-based, chicken-feather plastic uses no fossil fuels, the researchers said.
The feather-based plastic could be used for all kinds of products, from plastic cups and plates to furniture. In addition to making use of feathers that would otherwise end up in landfills, it is highly biodegradable.
This and other new sources of plastic may signal a shift in the way people think about packaging, said Walter Schmidt, a scientist with the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md., who works on making a different kind of plastic from feathers. "With foods, almost everyone understands half-life and shelf-life. No one expects milk in the fridge to be good three months after purchase."
Yet we rarely think of packaging in the same way, said Schmidt. "Stuff floats around in the ocean [or] is mixed in landfills that stay there for generations. A far better solution is to make less mess in the first place and to have that material naturally recycle in a reasonable amount of time." Although feathers are known to be tough, he added, there are no archeological sites containing reservoirs of feathers, showing that they break down over time.
The usefulness of any biopolymer, like the feather plastic, depends on the cost and versatility of the end product, said Schmidt, adding that when the price of oil increases, bio-alternatives become more attractive.
As concerns over the environment and shortages of raw materials grow, creative thinking about waste products takes on greater importance. "Think of a Styrofoam coffee cup," said Schmidt. "It is used for maybe 10-15 minutes and discarded; one can dig up a Styrofoam cup from a landfill 200 years from now, wash it out, and reuse it. This is an example of a lousy design." A better design is an ice cream cone: "The container lasts a little longer than the ice cream in it."
Although more work is needed to bring the new plastic into large-scale production, chicken feathers could soon be moving from the coop to the cup.
Provided by Inside Science News Service (news : web)